Remarketing for Search Versus Search Funnel

Google AdWords recently released Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, and here is what it means for you: From now on you will classify the clicks you buy based on these criteria:

New visitors vs. Repeat visitors

Non-buyers vs. Buyers

Profiles (stage in buying process) of visitors

Remarketing for Search will change everything about how you manage Search campaigns! When I learned about Google’s Remarketing for Search a few months ago, my first thought was, “This is the last nail in the search funnel coffin.”

I have written about what I called the lies of the search funnel in the past, claiming it is something invented by consultants and those not accountable for producing results from the ad budget. Remarketing for Search is the marketer’s dream and something we have been waiting for. Now the search funnel can be quantified, and it has become repeatable.

You are used to thinking about the clicks you are buying from Google as isolated keywords. What remarketing for Search allows you to do is to buy clicks based on the buyer behavior. This may be the biggest advancement for marketers yet. The Google tagging system allows you to create profiles of the people that come to your site, and the graphic below is an example for a typical eCommerce company. There are 7 stages from start to being a repeat customer, albeit some of the steps can be by-passed (which is irrelevant for this discussion).

Why is this a big deal? Because you can quantify the search funnel. Each profile in the above graphic most likely has a different conversion rate and revenue probability. This enables you to bid differently for clicks on users in each phase of the buying funnel.

You can bid by stage in the sales funnel with perfect data vs. bidding on assisted clicks where you have almost no useful data to base click purchase decisions on. All you need to do is create the different profiles, collect the data, and buy clicks based on the conversion rates and revenues/profit for each stage, and then you have given yourself a way to bid more aggressively on the clicks that yield more financial gain for your business.

How ever you manage your AdWords search campaigns, unless you act on this new feature aggressively, your competitors will leave you in the dust. Google has released more useful features in AdWords the past year+ than in the past decade combined. This complexity can be your friend or your enemy depending on how you manage it.

To learn more about how Finch enables our clients to take full advantage of Remarketing for Search and all other Google AdWords features, please visit us at www.finch.com. Start with a free analysis showing how we can improve your AdWords performance and save you time.